In many industrial applications, such as the manufacture of foods and beverages, especially in the meat processing industry, hard surfaces commonly become contaminated with soils such as carbohydrate, proteins, blood and water hardness soils, food oil soils, fat soils and other soils. Such soils can arise from the manufacture of both liquid and solid foodstuffs. Meat soils and residues such as proteins, fats, blood and oils, especially when dried, can be hard to remove soil. Similarly, carbohydrate soils, such as cellulosic, monosaccharides, disaccharides, oligosaccharides, starches, gums and other complex materials, when dried, can form tough, hard to remove soils, particularly when combined with other soil components such as proteins, blood, fats, oils, minerals, and others. The removal of such food soil, such as meat soils and residues, can be a significant problem.
Clean out of place systems (COP) cleaning techniques are a specific cleaning regimen adapted for removing soils from exterior surfaces of a wide variety of parts, such as ceramic surfaces, metal surfaces, walls, wash tanks, soaking vessels, mop buckets, holding tanks, scrub sinks, vehicle parts washers, non-continuous batch washers and systems, ceilings, external parts of production machinery and the like.
Often clean out of place methods can involve a first rinse, the application of the cleaning solutions, and a second rinse with potable water followed by resumed operations. The process can also include any other contacting step in which a rinse, acidic or basic functional fluid, solvent or other cleaning component such as hot water, cold water, etc. can be contacted with the equipment at any step during the process. Conventional clean in place as well as clean out of place methods require high temperatures, up to about 80° C. In production rooms, the elevated water temperature currently used for that kind of cleaning processes is in the range of about 40° C. to about 60° C. Conventional clean out of place techniques (COP) thus require the consumption of large amounts of energy.
Further cleaning compositions used in clean out of place processes, in particular in the food and meat processing industry are no-foaming or low foaming liquid compositions. No-foaming or low foaming cleaning compositions have the drawback that the dwell time or so called “soaking time” on an upright tiled wall is short due to a good flow rate of the liquid cleaning composition.
Furthermore, no-foaming or low foaming cleaning compositions have the drawback that the user cannot easily track the areas that are processed or not processed due to the brief residence time of the cleaning composition and low foam stability. There is a tendency that surfaces to be cleaned are treated twice thus require the consumption of large amounts of water and cleaning composition.
What is needed therefore is an improved cleaning composition for removing soils having increased foam stability at lower temperatures, an increased dwell time and being traceable.